Implementation of the Water Framework Directive in European marine waters.

In Europe, management and protection of the environment have historically been the responsibility of local or national agencies. This began to change with the long list of water-related European directives, which have set increasingly coordinated European targets for potable, waste and bathing waters. The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is the most significant of these as it draws together the existing legislation and sets overall quality goals for ecological status. The development of ecological assessment and classification systems is one of the most important and technically challenging parts of the implementation of the Water Framework Directive. It is the first time such systems have been required under Community legislation and all Member States are in a position of needing to significantly expand their technical knowledge and experience in classifying our ecological systems. The overall ecological classification will drive the management and policy outcomes for individual European countries. Eventually all member states will be required, under law, to have their water bodies in a ‘good’ status by 2015. If a water body is classified as less than ‘good’, then the member state(s) must decide on actions that will bring the biology back to ‘good’ status. In order to deliver this directive the UK and other members states were aware that an innovative approach was required, current monitoring was reviewed with respect to the directive and the need to develop new classification tools was identified where the current methods were not sufficient. Across Europe actions were taken to focus the effort on developing the classification tools and provide technical support for the unfolding directive. This special edition examines the various approaches to this challenge both from the view of researchers – developing monitoring and classification tools; and from science managers and regulators who have to provide routine monitoring to deliver the directive’s current tools as part of a comprehensive assessment of environmental health focusing on the work in marine inshore waters across Europe. The Water Framework Directive classifies surface waters based on the status a number of ‘‘quality elements’’;